We headed north on I-95 with the evening sun throwing long shadows across the median. The fields were wet from a recent rainstorm. My teeth were chattering almost uncontrollably, but I insisted on talking. Amrita drove in silence, occasionally glancing at me with those deep, sad eyes. She did not interrupt me even when I began to babble.

"I realized that it was exactly what they wanted me to do. What She wanted me to do," I said as we approached the state line. "I don't know why. Maybe She wanted me to take his place the way he took Das's. Or maybe Krishna saved me because he knew they would bring me back someday for some other insanity. I don't know. I don't care. Do you see what's really important?"

Amrita looked at me and said nothing. Evening light turned her tan skin gold.

"I've been blaming myself every day, knowing that I'll go on blaming myself until I die. I thought it was my fault. It was my fault. Now I know you've been blaming yourself."

"If I hadn't let her in —" began Amrita.

"Yes!" I said. It was almost a shout. "I know. But we have to stop that. If we don't go beyond that, we'll not only destroy each other and ourselves, we'll destroy what the three of us meant. We'll be part of the darkness."

Amrita pulled into a rest stop near the Salisbury Plains exit. She took her hands off the wheel. We sat in silence for several minutes.

"I miss Victoria," I said. It was the first time I had said our child's name to her since Calcutta. "I miss our baby. I miss Victoria."

Her head came over against my chest. I could barely understand her through the muffling of my shirt and the beginning of her own tears. Then it was clear.

"So do I, Bobby," she said. "I miss Victoria too."

We held each other as the trucks moved by in a rush of wind and noise and the last of the rush-hour traffic filled the lanes with sunbaked colors and the sound of tires on pavement.

Chapter Eighteen

We live in Colorado now. In the spring of 1982 I was invited out to do a modest workshop at a mountain college here and I went back East only long enough to get Amrita. Our subsequent visit has turned into a reasonably permanent residence. We've leased the house in Exeter, furnishings and all, but the eight paintings are hanging here against the rough wood of the cabin and the little Jamie Wyeth oil sketch we purchased in 1973 comes closest to catching the rich play of light we see out the window. That quality of light obsessed us our first few months here, and both Amrita and I have — sheepishly at first — tried oil painting.

The college facilities here are primitive by Boston standards, our salaries are low; but the house we're living in was once a ranger's cabin, and from our large window we can see snowy peaks over a hundred miles to the north. The light is so sharp and clear that it borders on being painful.

We wear jeans most of the time, and Amrita has learned how to handle the four-wheel-drive Bronco in mud and snow. We miss the ocean. Even more, we miss some of our friends and the benefits of coastal civilization. Our nearest town now is eight miles down the mountain from the campus and its boasts only 7,000 people at the height of the summer influx. The fanciest restaurant is called la Cocina, and our other dining choices are the Pizza Hut, Nora's Breakfast Nook, Gary's Grill, and the 24-hour truck stop on the Interstate. In the summer Amrita and I give a lot of our business to the Tastee Freez. The town library is operating out of an AirStream trailer until the new Civic Center is built. Denver is almost three hours away, and both mountain passes are closed for days at a time in winter.

But the air seems espcially clean here, and we feel somehow lighter in the morning, as if the altitude includes a dispensation from some of the gravity that inflicts its imperative on the rest of the world. And the quality of daylight here is more than a pleasant phenomenon, it is a form of clarity to us. A clarity which heals.

Abe Bronstein died last autumn. He had just finished work on the Winter Issue, the one that included a short piece by Ann Beattie, when he suffered a massive coronary while walking to the subway.

Amrita and I flew back for his funeral. Afterwards, over coffee with other mourners in the small townhouse he had shared with his mother, the old woman beckoned for Amrita and me to join her in Abe's room.

The small bedroom was made even smaller by the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that filled the better part of three walls. Mrs. Bronstein was eighty-six and seemed too frail to hold herself erect as she sat there on the edge of the bed. The room smelled of Abe's brand of cigars and of leather bookbindings.

"Here, please," said the old woman. Her hand was surprisingly steady as she handed me the small envelope. "Abraham left instructions for you to have this, Robert." Her throaty voice must once have been beautifully exciting. Now, as it measured out the words in the precise diction of an acquired language, it was merely beautiful. "Abraham said that I was to deliver this to you personally — even, as he put it, if I had to walk to Colorado to find you."

At any other time, the image of this frail old woman hitchhiking across the prairie would have brought a smile from me. Now I nodded and opened the letter.